2025-12-02 23:31:52I needed real food, and I needed it soon. The System might keep my skin from getting cut, but it wouldn’t stop me from starving.
There was only one option left. The Scrip Market.
The market wasn’t a place, not really. It was a time and a signal. Two hours after nightfall, in the loading dock of an old garment factory near the Hudson.
You needed a token to get past the lookouts a chipped piece of subway tile with a specific symbol scratched on it. I’d earned mine last winter by guiding a merchant through a sewer tunnel clear of sludge-crabs.
The damp night air bit at my newly-sensitive skin, each gust feeling like a whisper of information grit, salt, decay. I pulled my patched jacket tighter, the hood up. The Market was already humming with low energy.
Makeshift stalls glowed with soft bioluminescent fungus or buzzing Aura-stones. People traded in shadows, voices hushed. Here, you could barter for almost anything: algae wafers, purified water, salvaged tech, rumors, and sometimes, if you had the right currency, cultivation scraps.
My currency was gone. But I had a story. Information was sometimes worth a meal.
I moved to the back, to a stall shrouded in heavy, odorless smoke. Behind a curtain of beads sat Mara. She wasn’t old, but her eyes were. She traded in information and oddities.
“Kai,” she said, her voice like dry leaves. “You look like you wrestled a subway car and lost. Where’s your wheels?”
“Gone. Gutter-rat pack in the Concourse mall. An alpha.”
Her eyebrows, dyed a faint silver with crushed Aura-crystal, went up. “You’re alive. That’s something. The alpha?”
“Dead.”
Now her eyes sharpened. She leaned forward. “You? With that little knife you love?”
I shrugged, keeping my face neutral. “Got lucky. Jammed some rebar in its neck.”
“Hmm.” She didn’t believe me, not fully. “Lucky indeed. So. You come to trade the tale? ‘Brave Courier Slays Beast’? Not worth much. Beast kills are common.”
“Not like this one,” I said, lowering my voice. “It was smart. It herded me. The pack worked together. And the Aura… it was churning. Purple and black. Over the Heights.”
That got her. Her casual posture vanished. She glanced around, then gestured me closer. “Purple-black? Like a bruise in the air?”
I nodded.
“That’s not a random surge,” she whispered. “That’s directed. Contaminated. The Astors have been pumping waste Aura from their refining processes into the leylines under the old factories.
They’re poisoning the flows to claim the clean nodes upstream.” She shook her head. “Stupid and greedy. That kind of corruption twists the beasts. Makes them aggressive. Coordinated."
My mind raced. The Gutter King’s energy had felt vile, toxic. Was that Astor pollution? “So the rampages…”
“Aren’t accidents. They’re symptoms.” She sat back, her face grim. “That information is worth something. To the right people. But not to a hungry courier.” She reached under her stall and pulled out a wrapped nutrition bar the good kind, with real seeds in it.
“Here. For the warning. But Kai,” she paused, her eyes boring into mine. “A dead alpha, especially a twisted one, leaves a residue. The big players might come looking. They’ll want to know how it died. Van Der Wyck will want to know what poisoned it. The Astors will want to know who saw it. You weren’t there, understand?”
The unspoken words hung in the smoky air: Or you’ll disappear.
I took the bar, my appetite suddenly gone. “Understood.”
I turned to leave, the bar heavy in my hand.
“One more thing,” Mara called softly. I looked back. She was holding up a small, clear vial. Inside swirled a tiny amount of metallic-grey dust. “Found this near the old clocktower. It’s not mine to sell, but the owner is… indisposed.
It’s Iron-Scale Powder. For Skin Refining. Early stages. Pure, clean. Not Astor garbage.” She studied me. “You seem like you might have a use for it. It’s worth ten clean water rations. Or a significant favor.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. Iron-Scale Powder. The words made the System in my vision pulse gently. A notification appeared.
<< Material Detected: ‘Iron-Scale Powder’ (Grade: Low-Mortal). >>
<<Compatibility with [Breath of the Concrete Jungle]: High. >>
<<Estimated Progress Boost if Assimilated: 40-60%. >>
She was testing me. Offering a cultivator material to a courier. She’d seen something, or heard something. My survival was too neat.
I couldn’t afford it. A favor to Mara was a dangerous currency. But the System’ promise was clear. That powder could push me to Level 1. Real power. A chance.
“I don’t have ten rations,” I said, my voice tight.
“I said or a favor,” she replied, her smile thin. “The favor is: find out where the Astors are dumping their core waste. The main outlet. Not a guess. The exact location.”
A suicide mission. Spying on a bloodline family. “You’re joking.”
“I am not. This pollution is making the city sick. It’s bad for business. For all business.” She placed the vial on the counter between us. “The powder is yours now. The favor is owed. Find me the location before the next full moon. Or,” she shrugged, “the powder will have… consequences. It’s traceable, to those who know how to look.”
It was a threat wrapped in a gift. A leash. I was trapped.
I stared at the vial, the grey dust catching the dim light. It was my way forward, and my shackle. I reached out and took it. It was warm.
“The full moon,” I repeated, my voice flat.
“Good boy,” Mara said, her smile not reaching her eyes. “Now get lost. And Kai? Breathe easy. You look tense.”
The words felt like a code. A warning. As I melted back into the shadows of the market, the vial burning a hole in my pocket, I understood. The game had changed the moment the System appeared. I just hadn't known I was already on the board. The Astors, the beasts, Mara… they were all players.
And I was no longer just a courier trying to survive. I was a piece in play, with a dangerous new value. I had power I didn’t understand, and debts I couldn’t pay.
I slipped out into the night, the taste of the nutrition bar like ash in my mouth. The System’s text glowed steadily.
<< New Objective Added: Locate Astor Clan Aura-Waste Dump. >>
<<Time Limit: 14 Days. >>
<<Reward for Host: Favor Debt Cleared. >>
<<Failure: Hostile Attention from ‘Mara’ and Associated Parties. >>
I looked up at the bruised, Aura-streaked sky. “Great,” I muttered. “Just great.”
I started the long, careful walk back to my shelter, feeling the eyes of the city on my back real and imagined for the very first time.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
The Gardener
The being of earth and crystal regarded us with eyes that held the slow patience of tectonic plates. The air was thick with the smell of fresh soil and ozone. No one moved. Even the wild host stood frozen, their defiance swallowed by sheer, primal awe."Who are you?" I finally managed, my voice small against the vast presence."I AM THE MEMORY THIS PLACE HAS OF ITSELF," the Sentinel hummed. "YOU MAY CALL ME THE FOUNDATION. I SLEPT, WHILE THE CHILDREN PLAYED WITH POISON AND FIRE. YOUR 'SONG' WAS A LOUD ALARM CLOCK."It gestured with a hand of gnarled root and gleaming quartz towards the crystallized patches where our people were trapped. "THE ABSOLUTE CHILDREN WERE NEATENING UP. TIDYING AWAY THE NOISY TOYS. ANNOYING, BUT WITHIN THEIR RIGHTS.""Rights?" Elara spat, her fear overridden by fury. "They were turning people into statues!""FROM THEIR VIEW, THEY WERE PRESERVING INTERESTING PATTERNS. A KINDNESS, IN ITS WAY. BUT A BORING ONE." The Foundation's gaze settled on me. "YOU INTERESTE
The Uninvited Guests
The wild host didn't charge. They spread. They flowed around the edges of the Watch like a second, living perimeter. The Gravel-Behemoth planted itself between a melting hillock and one of our outermost resonators, its stony hide buzzing in sympathy with the Spike's dissonance. Crystal-scuttlers dug into the earth, their internal lights pulsing in erratic, chaotic patterns.The ragged survivors maybe fifty of them took up positions, not with military precision, but with the stubborn, practiced ease of people who had survived the worst the world could throw at them. They sang, shouted, chanted, or simply stood in silent, fierce defiance.Their Auras were a wild, untuned mess of individual colors and notes. They were the opposite of the Collective's order, the opposite of the Watch's tuned harmony. They were noise. Pure, beautiful, defiant noise.And it was working.The tetrahedron of silence, which had been methodically erasing our structured dissonance, faltered. It didn't know how to
The Flaw
The flight back to the coast was long, slow, and quiet. The Kuangshi limped through the sky on its patched-up thrusters, a low groan in its bones. Inside, the mood was a mix of hollow victory and grim shock. We’d survived, but we’d seen the board we were playing on, and it was vast, cold, and utterly uncaring.Rostova recovered quickly, her soldier’s discipline reasserting itself. She spent the flight in deep consultation with Li and Chen, downloading every scrap of data from the Lóngzhǐ’s surviving black boxes and her own fragmented memory. The picture that emerged was chilling.“They’re not just random cosmic horrors,” Rostova explained to us in the ship’s small mess hall. She called up a holographic map, not of stars, but of spiritual densities. “They’re processes. The Far Resonance the Silence is a force of entropic spiritual simplification. It seeks to reduce complex, ‘noisy’ realities back to a baseline of quiet uniformity.The Merging, what we faced… it seems to be a reaction t
The War of Absolutes
The beam of lonely red light from the reactor speared into the chaotic sky. The answering shadow a shard of absolute, focused silence plunged down like a dagger. They didn't meet with an explosion.They canceled.Where the spear of silence touched the beam of desperate connection, both simply ceased to be. It wasn't a battle. It was an erasure. A perfect, mutual annihilation.But the collision point wasn't in the sky. The silent shard drove down, following the beam to its source right into the heart of the infected hill.The eye in the ceiling shrieked, a sound of pure, existential terror. The welcoming flesh around us convulsed in a different kind of pain not the pain of overload, but the pain of unmaking. The silent shard was a scalpel of nothingness, and it was cutting into the hill's song of unified everything.The chamber shook violently. Glowing fungus turned grey and crumbled. Singing faces in the walls gasped and dissolved into wisps of confused Aura. The pressure holding us v
The Eye of the Storm
The eye in the hill stared. It wasn't angry. It was curious. A vast, sick intelligence peering at a new speck in its petri dish. The grinding sound was its voice, the land itself shifting as it spoke."DEFINITION IS A LIE. BORDERS ARE PAIN. WE OFFER UNION. PERFECT, PAINLESS COMPLETION."The words weren't just sound. They were a feeling, an oily promise that seeped into your mind. The grey, sterile patches on the landscape seemed to sigh with longing. The violently colorful flowers strained towards the eye.On the Kuangshi's bridge, alarms were soft, mournful beeps. Power was critically low. Weapons systems were offline. The leyline jump had drained the reserves. We were a tin can on a corrupted beach."Chen," Li said, her voice deathly calm. "Options for extraction. Immediate.""None, Commander," Chen whispered, his hands flying over the deadened controls. "Tertiary thrusters are offline. Leyline rudder is fused. We can't jump, we can't even crawl. We're… stuck."Elara had her weapon
The Distress Call
The ship was dark, groaning, and full of running footsteps. Emergency lights cast long, frantic shadows. The air smelled of ozone and something hotter, like melted crystal."The array is destroyed," Chen reported, his face lit by the glow of a handheld slate. "Catastrophic feedback. Primary power is gone. We're on reserves."Commander Li absorbed this, her face a mask of cold control in the dim light. "Casualties?""Minimal. The compartment was sealed. But the resonance backlash… it's scrambled half our systems.""And that signal?" I asked, my heart hammering. "The distress call?"Li nodded to Chen. He tapped his slate, and a filtered, cleaned-up audio stream filled the quiet corner of the observation gallery we'd crowded into."day 47. Structural integrity failing. The harmonic dissonance is not natural. Repeat, not natural. It is a directed attack. They are in the pattern. They are… rewriting the local reality from the inside. We cannot… we cannot hold the"The voice, a man's, broke
You may also like
Ethereal Adventure System
Dark Crafter41.3K viewsBecome a Super Rich With Destiny Changer System
BOSSSESamaaaa31.3K viewsMartial God Gamer
CrazeNovel135.2K viewsBecome a Super Rich With Crazy System
BOSSSESamaaaa163.8K viewsTHE MERCHANT'S SECRET: My Unexpted Isekai Life
The Guitarist4.0K viewsSHADE-BOUND Ascention System
Henry storm 402 viewsDuel of systems
Maguire351.6K viewsBeginnings of the Modern Mage
Blankmarks3.4K views